A Brief History of High Availability
cockroachlabs.com
A Brief History of High Availability
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: A Brief History of High Availability
#2Good read, thank you. I always welcome these articles where the notion of "how things came to be" is introduced. Makes it easier to manage the latest and greatest, when you have an understanding of how things have evolved.
Re: A Brief History of High Availability
#3Claiming that "high availability" started with the internet seems to ignore the role that Telcos (Bell Labs?) have played in our field and modern technological world.
The engineering work to deliver five nines of availability for POTS shouldn't be omitted in a piece about the history of HA, in my opinion.
Re: A Brief History of High Availability
#4Claiming that "high availability" started with the internet seems to ignore the role that Telcos (Bell Labs?) have played in our field and modern technological world. The engineering work to deliver five nines of availability for POTS shouldn't be omitted in a piece about the history of HA, in my opinion.
And telcos did that with much weaker hardware than is available today!
Re: A Brief History of High Availability
#5latency, throughput, availability and storage capacity, the quest for the holy grail.
Re: A Brief History of High Availability
#6HA was a thing long before "the internet" on mainframes, and still is. And apart from sharding, there were, and still are, load balancers for your service tier and HA (redundant, replicated) shared-disk DB clusters from Oracle and others around 1990 or earlier.
Re: A Brief History of High Availability
#7Claiming that "high availability" started with the internet seems to ignore the role that Telcos (Bell Labs?) have played in our field and modern technological world. The engineering work to deliver five nines of availability for POTS shouldn't be omitted in a piece about the history of HA, in my opinion.
I think it's ignored because the story is focused on databases' HA.
My impression from my limited telco experience (correct me if it's wrong) is that there was not much "database stuff" happening in telcos back in the days: only dispatch tables and call duration records come to mind. With then prevailing post-call billing, I assume a lot of the hard constraints on consistency were not there.
Re: A Brief History of High Availability
#8Hmm, I think potted history is more correct...
There is no mention hardware here. HP, Compaq, IBM and Sun all produced hardware with HA ability. Meaning that normal software could be run on two or more nodes, and should one break, it'd fall over with no loss of data, or outages. Here is a (contrived) video where they literally blow up a server stack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMCHpUtJnEI
You can do this with VMware, and if AWS could see a way to make money, they'd do it to. (For a while AWS's platform was not capable, but that was 7+ years ago. its much more lucrative to make people build in HA and redundancy into software, as its requires more services to run)
Re: A Brief History of High Availability
#9The opening about availability and our expectations hits right at home.
I'm originally from France, where stores closing during lunch time, sundays and mondays all day is normal. I remember when I moved to Canada, it seemed so amazing that stores were opened 7/7, and sometimes until 9pm (on Thursdays and Fridays). Wow!
Then I got used to it, and now, anytime I'm back in France, I just find it unacceptable and wonder how those store survive and make any money while always being closed!
Re: A Brief History of High Availability
#10The article mentions sharding (a scaling technique, not exactly something that helps with HA), but then it stops. Does every node in CockroachDB store all data?